Computational Analysis of Yaredawi YeZema Silt in Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Chants

TL;DR

This work addresses the underexplored Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church chant tradition by focusing on YeZema Siltoch and providing a computational framework to classify chanting modes using MIR. It introduces a high-quality dataset (≈369 recordings, over 10 hours) derived from Qidase-bet, and benchmarks a simple 1-D convolutional classifier on pitch-distribution features extracted from pYIN with stabilization and calibration. The authors further analyze mode-specific pitch structures by aligning distributions and fitting Gaussian Mixture Models, revealing distinct pitch centers and intervals for Ge'ez, Ezil, and Araray and prompting revisions to prior ethnomusicology claims. Overall, the study demonstrates the viability of time-averaged pitch-distribution descriptors for YeZema Silt and contributes open resources to promote preservation and scholarly exploration of EOTC chants.

Abstract

Despite its musicological, cultural, and religious significance, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC) chant is relatively underrepresented in music research. Historical records, including manuscripts, research papers, and oral traditions, confirm Saint Yared's establishment of three canonical EOTC chanting modes during the 6th century. This paper attempts to investigate the EOTC chants using music information retrieval (MIR) techniques. Among the research questions regarding the analysis and understanding of EOTC chants, Yaredawi YeZema Silt, namely the mode of chanting adhering to Saint Yared's standards, is of primary importance. Therefore, we consider the task of Yaredawi YeZema Silt classification in EOTC chants by introducing a new dataset and showcasing a series of classification experiments for this task. Results show that using the distribution of stabilized pitch contours as the feature representation on a simple neural network-based classifier becomes an effective solution. The musicological implications and insights of such results are further discussed through a comparative study with the previous ethnomusicology literature on EOTC chants. By making this dataset publicly accessible, we aim to promote future exploration and analysis of EOTC chants and highlight potential directions for further research, thereby fostering a deeper understanding and preservation of this unique spiritual and cultural heritage.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Interlinear letter-based notations with interspersed neumes. From the first underlined two words, the letters enclosed in red rectangles are used as short-form representations of the melody to be used over the other underlined words, sung with the same melody.
• Figure 2: Distribution of audio recording length (in secs).
• Figure 3: Illustration of pitch distributions for the three YeZema Siltoch. Top: the aligned pitch distributions of all the recordings. A row in the 2-D illustration represents the pitch distribution of one recording. Darker color represents larger values. Red background represents pitch distributions of the recordings in shelemay1993ethiopian. Middle: the average pitch distribution of the proposed dataset (green) and shelemay1993ethiopian (red). Bottom: GMM-estimated pitch distributions for all the recordings from both datasets. The pitch value of each note name under the bottom row is listed in Table \ref{['tab:gmm_result']}.
• Figure :